New telephone services are continually being developed by telephone service providers in order to meet the needs of their customers. As such services become available, the telephone companies, subscribers and the users seek yet further improvements in these services. Special services such as 800 service, 900 service, and Private Virtual Networks (PVN) are only a few of the possible services being offered. Other services might well be conceived and might well find extensive use. Unfortunately, however, new telephone services have heretofore required long and expensive design, testing and deployment activities. Such special telecommunications services are typically provided in the public telephone network by computer program call processing sequences residing in digital switches. A typical approach to providing such special services is the introduction into the telephone network of a service implementing network element which interacts with the telephone network so as to implement the telephone services. Such service implementing network elements are variously called Service Adjuncts (SAs), Service Switching Points (SSPs) and Service Control Points (SCPs). One such Service Adjunct is disclosed in S. M. Lin and J. F. Rizzo U.S. Pat. No. 4,878,240, granted Oct. 31, 1989. A typical Service Switching Point is disclosed in J. J. Bernardis U.S. Pat. No. 4,782,517, granted Nov. 1, 1988. Finally, a typical Service Control Point is disclosed in J. O. Boese et al. application Ser. No. 453,042, filed Dec. 12, 1989. Each such service implementing network element is equipped with a set of software-implemented service primitives which can be combined in various ways to implement a number of telephone services. A set of such primitives for a Service Adjunct is disclosed in the above-mentioned Lin et al. patent. Another set of primitives for a Service Switching Point is disclosed in the above-mentioned Bernardis et al. patent. Yet another set of such primitives for a Service Control Point is disclosed in "Business Services Database (BSDB): A Service Control Point (SCP) Application Designed to Support Private Virtual Network (PVN) Service, "Technical Advisory TA-TSY-000460, Issue 2, February 1988, published by Bell Communications Research, Inc., Red Bank, N.J. All of these sets of service-implementing primitives are, as a group, generally equivalent, although each is implemented in a slightly different way.
A telecommunications network including such programmable special service implementing components is called an "intelligent network." Such networks make it possible to offer useful and profitable new services such as 800 service, Alternate Billing service and Private Virtual Network service. Intelligent Network Call Processing Logic (INCPL) is the name given to the software that "stitches together" the appropriate service primitives to enable the Intelligent Network mechanism to implement and customize such services without the need for new switch software or hardware. Currently, this INCPL is custom-developed for each new service by a service designer, usually associated with the service provider, installed in the intelligent network service implementing component and supported by a service management system for that service. Thus, instead of the software to support a new service coming from a switch vendor, it can now come from a service vendor, making it possible to reduce the interval between service concept and service offering. Unfortunately, a great deal of time is still required to design custom and implement each new service. Moreover, since such service designs are not highly portable, further delays arise due to the need to provide widely distributed software elements to support the new service in a wide variety of different environments.